LE Remove the clock completely

[XenialJesse]

The Instinctive Exploration mod, or the less buggy Project Ultimatum, allows the player to get a rough idea of the time by looking at the sun. It's a neat little addition to the realism, and to the gameplay, since you are then stuck without the time at night, in dungeons, or in bad weather. I like that kind of thing.

 

I'd like it more if the player was forced to rely on this natural method, with no way to cheat or accidentally stumble upon the time in the middle of the night. So this would mean removing the clock from:

- the escape menu

- the wait popup

- the sleep popup

- anything else I've missed?

 

That's the basic request. At its simplest this would require removing only the time while leaving the date intact. I imagine it might be easier for a modder to remove the entire date and time string in all of the sections mentioned above, and if that really is significantly easier, it's fine. Fine, because the well-executed A Matter Of Time mod can then be used to pick up the missing date displays.

 

I think it could go down well with players who enjoy things like Frostfall, Hunterborn, or Realistic Needs and Diseases, as it would affect their process of deciding when to sleep, as well as players who use realistically dark nights that they prefer their character to sleep through.

 

Some ideas for extensions:

 

1. The player can determine the time in some manner from inns and shops. I would suggest imitating the accuracy of Instinctive Exploration again for this, only providing guestimates rather than an unrealistically precise minute. However I don't have a good suggestion for how this might be implemented. Intuitively we'd ask the guy working at the counter, but Skyrim doesn't have the dialogue for it. I haven't seen a single clock in the game apart from the Clocks in Skyrim mod, but upon considering what's required to create the parts inside a mechanical clock, they seem lore-unfriendly to me.

 

2. Sundials. If a potential modder is feeling really ambitious, creating and placing sundial meshes in the game, whose real time shadows really do reveal the time. That's probably not a very realistic aim, what with the inaccuracy of shadows and all.

So alternatively and much more simply, provide sundial meshes that just need to be activated. Upon activation, some HUD text or a popup would tell the player what they want to know. Again, this could imitate Instinctive Exploration: only rough estimates, only when the sun is shining. Activations on overcast days could result in some HUD text like "I can't read the sundial with this poor amount of sunlight" or "The sundial isn't very helpful at night", etc.

 

 

So that's about it.

The no-frills version is simply: Can we remove the time from the Escape menu, wait dialog, and sleep dialog?

 

 

 

Edit - Moved my "random oversleeping" suggestion to a completely separate mod request. http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/2370919-no-magical-alarm-clocks-untimed-uncontrolled-real-sleep/

Edited December 14, 2014 by XenialJesse